The booklet was found lying in a gun nest, beside a pile of spent cartridges from an AK-47 rifle and a 45mm machine gun. In the middle of an al-Qaida terrorist training camp in an isolated desert valley 60 miles from Kandahar, the address on the back was somewhat incongruous: 114 Chute House Road, Stockwell Park Estate, London, SW9.

The crudely printed pamphlet included handwritten instructions on how to use Kalashnikovs, M-16s, Uzis and other light automatic weapons. Written neatly in broken English, it described places to shoot a person so that the wound would be fatal.

The address on the back of the booklet was for a flat in a council block in the middle of one of London's multi-ethnic housing estates, just 400 yards from Brixton police station. The current tenant, who has lived there for 18 months, said she was shocked to learn her address had connections with al-Qaida.

Neighbours reported that the former tenants were a woman and her two daughters, of African descent, and had lived there for a number of years. Shortly after Zacarias Moussaoui, the man charged in the US with involvement in the September 11 plot, was arrested, there were reports that he had lived with his north African girlfriend in a flat in the Brixton area. No address was given but police are known to have raided an apartment at Lambert Road, a mile from Chute House, as part of their investigation.

The emergence of the address will raise further fears that al-Qaida cells have been operating in London. It is a few streets away from the mosque in Brixton where Richard Reid, the Briton who is suspected of trying to blow up an airliner with a bomb hidden in his shoes, is believed to have met Moussaoui. The two men were in regular telephone contact when they lived in Britain.

Moussaoui was being monitored by British intelligence while living as a student in the capital, but agents were unable at the time to identify Reid from their phone calls, which were intercepted last year.

Moussaoui, who American authorities believe was the 20th hijacker, lived in south London for nine years and is alleged to have gone on to become an al-Qaida operative.

Moussaoui is believed to have met and influenced Reid. Both went on to train in an al-Qaida camp in Pakistan, though it remains unclear whether they were there at the same time or indeed if the newly raided Afghan camp was in fact their training base.

The camp at Garmawak where the south London address was found - known to locals as Rut Para camp - was raided by US marines earlier this week.

They say it was home to hundreds of trainee terrorists at any one time and that between 150 and 200 cars used to drive to and from the camp every day.

The camp lies amidst a desolate rocky valley and beside a typically dramatic mountain backdrop. A deep ravine containing a half-dozen caves runs through the area, with many of the caves linked by tunnels. The camp's commando-style obstacle course is the size of a football field.

The camp was found to contain books written by Osama bin Laden, as well as manuals of bomb-making and demolition.

Examination papers found among the rubble of the flattened camp showed that student terrorists learned the best way to shoot down an aircraft, at what height, the angle at which the weapon should be fired and how many people would be required to carry it.

Questions included: "If a plane is travelling at a height of 900 metres and a speed of 500 metres a second, which part of the aircraft should you target with your weapon?"

Three trainee terrorists all chose the correct spot of the four circled options on a sketch of a plane.

The Arabic-language tests of three students, Abu Hassan Qatari, Musaub al Freeb and Osama, focused on the use of the old Russian-made Dashka anti-aircraft weapon.

Out of a maximum score of 30, Al Freeb scored 24.5, Osama 22 and Qatari 19.5. Qatari was poor on dates and left some answers blank. Al Freeb gave detailed responses.

Some of the questions were handwritten in red. Some were fill-in-the-blanks. Others required dates. A few were specific to a weapon's weight and range. Each correct answer was marked with a red check mark, each wrong answer with an 'x.'

The questions were basic. Students had to know the inner workings of the weapon, how to take it apart and put it back together. They had to know the ammunition it used, how many rounds it could fire per minute and per second.

The students drew careful designs of weapons, or of a human being, carefully marking off target areas between the eyes and the heart.

Paper was strewn around the training camp site, though much of it was burned. In one cave were several paperback books by Bin Laden entitled A Call to Jihad, which rails against the US and British military presence in Saudi Arabia, the Gulf and the Middle East.

In one notebook there was a Pashtu-language poem dedicated to the Taliban's leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, along with scribblings from one friend to another. On one page the student practised his signature over and over.

There were doodles and chiding notes between friends. A postcard of fighters trudging up a rocky hillside at sunset says in Arabic: "Today Afghanistan, tomorrow Pakistan."

A cutout pencil drawing of a Kalashnikov rifle is pasted on to the front. "Made in Pakistan," is printed on the back.

The marines said there were indications that the camp had been inhabited as recently as two weeks ago.

During their raid, however, they failed to notice the British address, which could prove to be a valuable piece of intelligence.

The south London connection

Zacarias Moussaoui, 33

American investigators are convinced Moussaoui was set to be the 20th hijacker on September 11, but he was arrested on immigration charges four weeks earlier in Minnesota after flying school staff became suspicious when he asked to go to jumbo jet simulators without completing his basic training first.

A French national of Morrocan extraction, Moussaoui is thought to have moved to London in 1992. He took a masters degree in international commerce at South Bank University, and attended Brixton mosque in Gresham Road, south London, near the address found on the pamphlet in Afghanistan yesterday. He is also known to have lived in a flat in Brixton.

Abdul Haqq Baker, chairman of Brixton mosque, said Moussaoui was openly extreme in his religious beliefs. In the summer of 1998 he left the mosque, apparently frustrated at the moderate Islamic teaching practised there.

He appeared in a US court on Wednesday charged with six counts of conspiracy, including conspiracy to murder and acts of terrorism.

Richard Reid, 28

Reid, the so-called shoe bomber, is thought to have met Moussaoui at Brixton mosque between 1995 and 1998. A mugger and petty thief from Bromley, south London, Reid served several spells in prison during the mid-1990s including one in Feltham young offenders' institute in 1995. During this time he converted to Islam, and on his release was directed to Brixton mosque, which has a reputation for informally helping Muslim offenders on release.

Speaking last week after Reid had narrowly failed to blow up a passenger jet using explosives hidden in his shoes, Abdul Haqq Baker described him as an "affable, amiable" fellow when he first attended the mosque. However, he gradually became interested in extreme interpretations of Islam.

Mr Baker became convinced Reid was mixing with extremists who targeted the mosque because of its largely young, convert congregation. Reid began arguing that jihad justified violence. In the summer of 1998 he stopped attending the mosque and is believed to have travelled to Pakistan and possibly Afghanistan before launching his botched terrorist attack.